The Heretic's Daughter

At the end of July, Tom and Sarah are working in the hayloft of the barn when they notice a rabid stray dog approaching. Hannah is down below, directly in line with the animal if it should choose to attack. Sarah wants to retrieve the flintlock, but there isn’t time. Thinking quickly, Tom takes some pebbles from his pocket and throws them past the dog, drawing its attention away from the children. Afterward, he reminds Sarah that he isn’t a weakling but can also help take care of the family. He then follows the dog and shoots it. At his words, Sarah thinks, “There was a shifting away of something weighty and grasping about my shoulders” (237).

By the beginning of August, Martha’s sentence is handed down: She’s scheduled to be hanged on the 19th. By the 10th, Sarah and Tom are arrested and taken in for questioning. They appear before nine judges and the girls who accuse them of witchcraft: “I saw a group of young women and girls standing in tortured agony, their hands clapped over their mouths as if they were nailed there, cawing and moaning and straining to speak through their fingers” (241).

When questioned, Sarah and Tom do as their mother instructed. They ruefully admit that they’re witches and learned the craft from Martha. The court trots forth the various people with whom Sarah and Tom argued to testify that the Carrier children either cursed or bewitched them. After the examination, the accused are taken to the Salem jail. Sarah describes entering the dank, crowded cellar cells: “It was like crawling headfirst into a midden that had been rained upon and then sealed with a tight canvas under a baking sun. The smell of rot was so sharp and so far-reaching that my eyes ran over” (248). She and Tom are placed in the women’s cell, which is packed with young and old in a deplorable state.

Across the corridor, Martha is held in a cell with the condemned, while her older sons are in the adjoining men’s cell. Sarah can exchange a few words with her mother and brothers. The children are then clamped into eight-pound manacles whose expense is charged to their father. All the prisoners depend on food and clothing that their families supply. If no one provides them with food, they starve. Thomas brings whatever food he can, but it’s barely enough to keep his loved ones alive. Sarah describes the rats, lice, and horrific sanitary conditions in the cell. She finds her cousin Margaret and her Aunt Mary, but the latter refuses to speak to her and drives her away. The next morning, the jailer’s wife, Goody Corwin, comes to the cells, offering to barter clothing for food. Some of the prisoners are wearing nothing but bare shifts. Goody Corwin later sells their garments and turns a profit.

Sarah and Tom grow concerned because their brother Andrew has become feverish. A wound under his manacle has become infected, and blood poisoning has set in. A doctor is summoned, but he demands payment and says that Andrew’s arm must be amputated. The boy refuses the surgery, and Sarah threatens to curse the doctor. His fear of witchcraft causes him to leave in a hurry. Sarah and Tom are sure that Andrew will die soon, and they keep watch over him, but his fever miraculously breaks, and the infection subsides. This leads some of the other inmates to think that Sarah has used witchcraft to cure him. More likely, the salve applied by the doctor helped reverse the infection.

The following Monday, a young doctor named Ames comes to minister to the sick in the women’s cell. He tells Sarah that he’s a friend of her father’s. He also explains that Thomas didn’t kill Uncle Roger, as Sarah suspected. In his last days, Roger repented for his bad behavior. Rather than betraying his wife and daughter by naming them as witches, he used foxglove to take his own life. Doctor Ames gave him a quantity of the drug because Roger complained of a heart condition, but he knew that taking too much at one time would mimic a heart attack. Sarah is relieved that her father wasn’t responsible for Roger’s death. Ames tells her that the note Thomas received from her uncle the night before he died was a confession.

The week passes in misery as Sarah counts down the days to her mother’s execution. Thomas arrives to bid his wife farewell the night before. The following morning, Martha’s children are distraught as she’s led away: “She was not given the chance to linger, to touch or embrace her sons and daughter, but she sought out each of us with her eyes and lingered there in prideful silence” (285-86). Thomas is present at the execution site so that he can be with Martha during her last moments.